Now that ​Bêlit was established in her own right and her relationship with Conan had begun to develop as their love had the power to even destroy a magician's illusion in Conan the Barbarian #68, we could really get this sea-bourne road trip moving. The next fourteen issues, from #70 to #83, would send the crew of the Tigress behind enemy lines for a chance to get to know Stygia, complete with its snake worshippers and Black Ring wizards. What may look like fairly standard fantasy adventure fare from the outside actually offers some of the best of what the Bronze Age of Comics had. The comic thunders with life.

It's instantly apparent from the beginning that there's a stark uptick in art quality right at issue #70. "The City in the Storm!" which the first in a two-part free adaptation of Robert E. Howard's "Marchers of Valhalla," sees inker Ernie Chan return to the title to embellish penciller John Buscema's work. Ernie's inks synthesize perfectly with Buscema's art to really earn the title "Embellisher." The full-page illustration at the start of issue #71 as an example, their Conan is powerfully posed and always looks great in motion. This is undeniably the A-Team at play: a Gil Kane cover, Big John B and Ernie Chan on the art, with Roy Thomas scripting an adaptation of a Howard story... 70s comics don't get better than that. 

These issues play a lot with Conan and Bêlit that further endear the pair to us, and each other. A brief moment between them in #71 starts as a power struggle and ends with a moment of quiet reflection. In the medium of comics, where space equals time, it's incredibly brief, especially that slim last panel where Bêlit is framed alone against the night sky, caught off-guard in a long shot as Conan has disarmed her. 

​Looking back, Roy says that all of this storytelling looks effortless, and you can absolutely tell the team's having fun.

For most of the rest of this period, Bêlit and the Black Corsairs head into Stygia, where Roy Thomas became the first person to really flesh the country out. In REH's original canon, it's seen in Hour of the Dragon, and we see lots of Stygians like Thoth-Amon in "Red Nails," "Xuthal of the Dusk," and "The Phoenix on the Sword." But surprisingly, most of the cities of Stygia are named but unseen. The black walls of Khemi, the capital Luxur, and the magician city Keshatta are mostly out-of-frame. But first, they would return to Shem.

Issue #72's "Vengeance in Asgalun" includes one of Gil Kane's "Conan is mad at you, specifically" covers from this period (they're all fun) and pits our pair against Stygians in Bêlit's home city of Asgalun. Disguised as a humble blacksmith his wife, Conan and Bêlit get to trade comical blows while in character. For this brief episode, Conan the Barbarian becomes part sitcom. Though the reveal is cut short by Stygian sorcerer Ptor-Nubis (tied to Thoth-Amon through the Black Ring), Bêlit learns that her father may still be alive before she escapes with her "husband."

Storytelling surprises abound in issue #74, which feels incredibly modern compared to the rest of the series. Conan is asleep aboard the Tigress when an extended dream sequence begins in which Thoth-Amon reaches out to and threatens the Cimmerian, who remembers him from issue #7's adaptation of "The God in the Bowl." It makes some sense for Roy to remind us of who will eventually become Conan's big bad and it adds to the Stygian menace if you keep in mind that, up until and including this point, Conan and Thoth haven't actually met each other in person. Since they don't seem to really have a personal history in REH stories like "The Phoenix on the Sword" and Roy didn't want to upset the original canon, he came up with the excuse that maybe Thoth-Amon didn't realize he was reaching out to Conan in his dreams either. Eh, I guess I'll take it.

The rest of the issue feels paced like a Modern Age book, complete with thoughtful character moments and a quick battle at the end on the black walls of Khemi. The Black Corsairs also pick up the recurring character Neftha here. She and Bêlit will in the coming issues do... well, I guess you would call it "grayface," considering how the Stygians are colored in this book. You can't see it right now, but I'm shrugging my shoulders pretty hard and grimacing more out of confusion than distaste.

Issues #75 through 77 take us to the city of Harakht with its hawk riding sentries for a fun three-part adventure that separates Conan from the crew for a time and leaves him "Swordless in Stygia." Ultimately, our heroes end up being part of a crew that helps depose the evil twin ruler Hor-Neb, leaving his more benevolent brother Mer-Ath the sole ruler of the Hawk-City of Harakht. It's nice to see that not all Stygians are snake-worshippers and wizards!

As the creative team did from time to time, issue #78 reprints Savage Sword #1. Roy freely admits they were forced to print a rerun because he was being lax with his deadlines. This time, it wasn't just a ploy to catch up with the monthly comic schedule, though, but to print a story that had been used elsewhere out of necessity. SSOC #1 was originally intended to be Conan #43, but had been moved over to Savage Sword since the planned adaptation of "Black Colossus" was taking too long and would be pushed back to issue #2. Roy wasn't too broken up about it; he figured that readers eager to continue the story from issue #42 would hop on over to Savage Sword and maybe get hooked there, cross-pollinating the readership to the new book. But he'd still wanted to see the issue in color, so he finally brought it over about 35 issues later.

With Buscema busy on Savage Sword and a few other books, the regular Conan title was going to see an art switch-up for the foreseeable future. Howard Chaykin, who had worked with Roy on his Star Wars comic adaptation in 1977, was brought in to pencil the book. According to Roy, he really only did the layouts, with Ernie's pens finishing the artwork so that it didn't look too different from Buscema's stuff. And Roy's right- they look about 80% the same.

This set of issues, from #79 to 81, adapt one of Robert E. Howard's El Borak stories, "The Lost Valley of Iskander." The original story features only Francis Xavier Gordon, who Roy could reskin to Conan fairly easily, but a tougher issue to deal with was what Conan's companions should be up to during this adventure. Roy employed those very-cool hawk riders from Harakht and simply had Conan help them with a mission that would take them away from the city. That would get him away from the crew of the Tigress for a while and he could get lost, solo, in the Valley of Iskander. This enchanted valley is somehow out of time (and enchanted? Conan can't seem to remember Bêlit...), with Roy explaining in captions that this "Iskander" fellow for whom the valley takes its name is actually our Alexander the Great, who has somehow already been here long ago, despite not yet being born for thousands of years. I'm reminded of an interview of Jason Alexander pushing back against an inconsistent character moment for George Costanza on Seinfeld. Larry David told Jason, "Who cares, as long as it's funny?" Roy seems to be saying to readers, "Who gives a shit, as long as it's adventurous?" I'm with him. 

​Conan becomes embroiled in the power struggles of the city of Attalan in the Valley of Iskander and though he clashes with the gigantic Ptolemy, he chooses to defend the city from invading Stygians and he becomes a hero for it. He marches out of the city at the end, somehow back into the regularly-temporal Hyborian Age where he remembers Bêlit just fine.

While Roy admits that Marvel editorial wasn't super happy with him (since "The Valley of Iskander" wasn't a Conan story, they had to pay extra for the rights to adapt it), Roy makes special note of the fact that this issue had the first advertisement for Marvel toys- in this case, dolls- featuring Conan alongside other heroes like Spider-Man, Hulk, and Captain America. He took this as a sign that Conan was not only a sales juggernaut, but a comic cultural one, too. He figured he could get away with the adaptation: 

From here, Conan trudges into the swamps of Stygia.

With a two-parter in issues #82 and 83, Roy dares the extremely tricky task of adapting one of Robert E. Howard's most racist stories: "Black Canaan." Roy usually tiptoed around Howard's racism and qualified it by saying things like only "overly-sensitive" readers found it racist, but we can have intelligent, honest discussions about what we like in 2026; it's horrifically racist. I suspect that Roy somewhat agreed, because he does quite a bit of work to eliminate the racist elements and re-cast them in a less-outmoded way.

He gives Conan a line about choosing his friends by something other than skin color, and Conan actively dismisses some robbers' skin colors to the reader. He removes the conflict from the Black Canaanites vs. White Canaanites conflict of the original story and sets Stygians (themselves people of color) and the Black residents of a village called Viper's Head. In Roy's hands, the story still thumps with tension, fear, and sexuality, but in a way that lets you focus on the black magic and sexy siren lady who you know is bad news. Issues #82 and 83 end up being a very cool exercise in what Roy Thomas means when he splashes the banner "Freely adapted from..." across his title page.

There's a very clear delineating point between here and the rest of the Conan and Bêlit saga, which had 17 more issues to go. Roy and his team were about to introduce one of the coolest characters of the whole saga. The death of the Queen of the Black Coast draws near!

For how large Bêlit looms in the Conan canon, it's always been something of an oddity that she and Conan were together for such a short time. 

If you read Robert E. Howard's "Queen of the Black Coast," there's a gap between Chapters I and II that seems, to me at least, to last a few weeks or a few months while they really fall for one another before Bêlit is killed by the end of the story (spoilers for a story that's approaching 100 years old). I suppose it's appropriate that their romance would be quick: both Conan and Bêlit are strong, fiery people and their relationship probably wouldn't have lasted. I have a hard time picturing them running to Walgreens together because they ran out of milk, or whatever the Hyborian Age equivalent of that would be.

Writing comics for Marvel in the 70s, Roy Thomas and co. were using the L. Sprague de Camp timeline, which Roy agreed set Conan and Bêlit's time together aboard the Tigress at about three years, so Roy was gearing up for a serious saga, one that he called the "saga of Conan and Bêlit." The Conan the Barbarian title was more or less passing in real time, so Roy was planning a a corresponding three real years of stories with the the pirates together. His plan was to take that ripe time between Chapters I and II and to expand it into an epic that went from the coast to the jungles, and, eventually, to a throne.

From issue #58 to issue #100, Roy Thomas's Conan and Bêlit saga would become one of the definitive peaks of Marvel's Conan the Barbarian.

As he did during his "War of the Tarim" saga, Roy soft-launched the era an issue ahead of time. It helped having "Queen of the Black Coast" to use as a basis for everything moving forward. In the issues prior to #58, Roy had Conan acquire the items he's wearing at the start of the Howard story- a red cloak, a horned helmet, a mail hauberk.

There was ripe ground for connecting his comic narrative threads to REH's pirate story in two paragraphs at the beginning in which Conan relates to his captain, Tito, about getting into some legal trouble because of killing a guard over the "sweetheart of a young soldier," who Roy made into Yusef and Tara, two really likable characters that had been travelling with Conan in the comic book for a few issues. Issue #57 shows this incident that separates Conan from the young pair, as he cleaves a magistrate's skull in two with some not-very-Code-approved violence. This issue features a hella Gil Kane cover, but its sub-par pencils by Mike Ploog (what is with the way this dude draws faces?) make me really glad that John Buscema would be back the following issue.

Issue #58 begins on horseback as Conan careens toward the Argossean harbor. He leaps aboard a ship and demands that it take him away with it, officially beginning his adaptation of "Queen of the Black Coast" in the same place Howard did. Weirdly enough, two pages are eaten up by almost entirely recapping the previous issue's story as though Buscema was eager to put his stamp on the story. Conan sails south, past Shem, Stygia, and some classic sea sirens. You know what happens next as the Argus is boarded by Bêlit and her Black Corsairs, who are impressed by Conan's ability with a sword, causing him to be folded into the crew.

Roy sparred a little with the Comics Code Authority administrators here as the subtext of the story gets a little steamy. In fact, while much of the dialogue remains in tact from the exact words Howard wrote, many of the changes are simply to appease the Comics Code. At one point, Bêlit's "supple thigh" brushes against Conan's sword (hubba hubba), which Roy didn't even bother including since he knew the Code would throw it out. Bêlit's "mating dance" was changed to her "love dance" at Code request and a panel of Conan and Bêlit kissing was re-drawn because Code administrator Len Darvin thought it looked too much like Bêlit was about to go down on the Cimmerian. 

The next two issues, #59 and #60, establish a backstory for Bêlit which was noticeably absent in the original story. Roy figured with three years of stories to tell ahead of him, and since the Marvel readership liked origins, he probably needed to provide one, though he thought it was intentional that Howard had never given her one. He decided to base it on a line from Howard in which she says, "Wolves of the blue sea, behold ye now the dance — the mating-dance of Bêlit, whose fathers were kings of Askalon!" As with all things REH, made-up proper nouns changed names every now and then (like Tamar and Tarantia), but "Askalon" is probably Asgalun, Shem.

The Conan team titled their origin story "The Ballad of Bêlit" to mirror the earlier issue "The Song of Red Sonja." In Roy's continuity, Bêlit is the daughter of Shemite royalty who is forced to flee as a little girl when a Stygian plot to kill her dad is successful. Roy expands the role of the extremely minor Black Corsair N'Yaga (mentioned just twice in "Queen of the Black Coast") into a trusted advisor of her dad's, and a surrogate father figure for her once they'd been deposed. This also helps explain how she came to command her pirate crew, as N'Yaga spun a tale that she is the daughter of the death goddess Derketa. As such, the Black Corsairs all address her as "Goddess."

Writing in ​Bêlit's backstory as the wandering daughter of a deposed king ended up being essentially Roy's secret weapon. Whereas he would keep the fire and the bravado of Howard's original character, his Bêlit would have the additional righteous indignation of reclaiming her lost throne. It gives the saga a clear, ultimate end-point and ups the stakes considerably. The relationship between Conan and ​Bêlit helped the book find a new verve as well: Conan now had a much deeper personal buy-in to the stories. Adding ​Bêlit to the book feels like finally adding Robin to Batman in that there was now a relationship at the core of the book that could run much deeper than the team-ups Conan usually had. It is made all the sweeter that we knew that partnership has its days numbered.

Roy had one other blank to fill in as well. While both "The Scarlet Citadel" and "The Hour of the Dragon" refer to Conan as "Amra" of the Black Corsairs, the name actually isn't used even once in his Black Coast adventure, which meant Roy was pretty free to give him the name however he wanted. He chose to have Conan earn it. Roy essentially turned "Amra" into a transferable title In issues #61-63, Conan goes up against the original Amra, lord of the lions, who is blatantly a Tarzan ripoff that Roy doesn't even deny. He had bad blood with the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate from working with them on Tarzan comics, and took out his revenge in the pages of Conan the Barbarian.

The original Amra is a red-haired, loincloth-wearing jungle man with a jet-black lion as his companion. While the first issue of the Amra storyline didn't grab me, its ending more than makes up for it. Issue #63 has a few pages showing off what Roy Thomas and John Buscema do best: Roy narrating an intense fight with Buscema's pencils showing the action. It's an incredible close-quarters knife fight that uses perspective tricks to create a cinematic, breathtaking comic book experience.

Issue #64 reprints the Savage Sword story "The Secret of the Skull River." Boo. Roy tells a bizarre story about this one: inker Steve Gan "fell in love" so hard with the Buscema pencils he was sent to ink that he refused to return them. Apparently they didn't get the pages back from the Phillipines in time and just had to reprint an old story.

The next set of issues pitted the crew of the Tigress against a slew of fantastic Bronze-Age baddies Ahmaan the Merciless (#65), Dagon the Death God (#66), and an enchanted man-tiger (#67). This type of comic book storytelling doesn't really exist anymore: classic one-and-dones that feature a complete story are all the more charming for it. That last story has the best villain with its anthropomorphic cat villain, but also brings Tara, Yusef, and even Red Sonja back after a 30-issue absence and we get to see ​Bêlit betray some jealousy for the first time. It's endearing to see the brutal Queen of the Black Coast get cautious about the She-Devil with a Sword, especially since longtime readers know that Sonja isn't about to give it up for Conan. But Bêlit doesn't know that, so it's actually kind of cute.

Sonja sticks around for a few issues and we get an adventure with Kull, Gonar the Pict, and Brule the Spear-Slayer through issue #68, "Of Once and Future Kings!" 

After nonstop seafaring adventure for ten issues aboard the pirate ship, it was time for a break. Issue #69 adapts the Robert E. Howard story "Out of the Deep" which makes for one of Roy's best issues ever. Roy says in his Barbarian Life book that this kind of story would usually be saved for Savage Sword, but it was likely used here for scheduling reasons. Though it's unclear why Buscema was unable to pencil the story, it became one of Val Mayerik's first Conan credits. The beauty of Mayerik's art, which is like a halfway point between Windsor-Smith and Buscema, is perfect for the issue.

Sending us back in time to an episode taking place before Conan #2, the Cimmerian is captured and taken to a seaside village where fuckery is afoot. There appears to be an entity from the ocean that has taken members of the village and either created copies of their bodies or sucked their souls right out. The village isn't sure who to trust, but Conan's natural distrust for magic puts him on edge enough to not rule out sorcery. As he helps defend the village, he demonstrates some of the decency that makes him such a likable character.

After this interlude, it was back to the Black Coast and particularly to Stygia, where we would spend a handful of fantastic issues. Perhaps Roy's greatest skill in comics was to adapt, embellish, and flesh out. His "Queen of the Black Coast" saga is my vote for the best example of that.

The last time I covered a saga like this, it was a mere seven issues before it was all wrapped up, and even then it felt like an incredible epic. At the end of the first year of the "Queen of the Black Coast" saga, a dozen issues in, Conan's time with Bêlit was just beginning. Read Part Two of this series here!